Opinion Brief: Tuesday, October 20, 2015

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Good evening, subscribers. Academics will be picking over the bones of Campaign 2015 for the next decade or more. Here at the iPolitics opinion section, we don’t have the patience for history — we’re moving on to the next big thing.

And the next big thing for the Conservative party, says Michael Harris, is civil war, in all likelihood. With the party’s internal divisions and contradictions — regional and ideological — already surfacing in the post-defeat blame game, the question now is: who can start the renewal process — and will Stephen Harper himself be able to keep his thumb off the scale? “Harper wants his successor to symbolize the triumph of the Reformers over their more progressive eastern cousins. More important, he wants the power of the CPC to run through Calgary.”

Here’s L. Ian MacDonald with the complete 360 on how the Trudeau Liberals did the unexpected — a campaign triumph that depended as much on rivals’ unforced errors as it did on strategy. “Stephen Harper overplayed his hand on the niqab, especially in English-speaking Canada, where voters recoiled at his musing about banning the niqab in the public service. This is Canada, for heaven’s sake. We don’t do that here.”

Tasha Kheiriddin points out that, while Justin Trudeau seemed like a breath of fresh air after the locked-down style of Stephen Harper, the Liberals depended as much as anyone on rigid message discipline in this campaign. “Trudeau and his team lifted Harper’s controlling style, while preaching the opposite. This isn’t a criticism. If anything, it provides a lesson to the Conservatives about how successful politicians do business.”

And Andrew Mitrovica points out that Harper and the Conservatives weren’t the only losers last night. The Globe and Mail and the Postmedia newspaper chain, with their contrived endorsements of the Conservatives, showed themselves to be woefully out of touch with their audiences. “The Conservative party Stephen Harper built isn’t the only institution in need of some soul-searching. The witch is dead — but so is the dignity of an establishment press that told us to vote for the witch.”